Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 10C, August 4, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.
If you would like to listen to the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the texts below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Hosea 11.1-11; Psalm 107.1-9, 43; Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our texts this morning again point out the fundamental problem of the human condition and God’s response to our brokenness, and this is what I want us to look briefly at this morning. Specifically I want us to look at what being in Christ really means because it contains the essence of God’s Good News to us.
You recall that in our OT lesson from last week, God directed his prophet Hosea to take a prostitute for a wife to symbolically act out Israel’s unfaithful relationship to God despite God’s constant love for Israel. In today’s lesson, we see God continuing to reflect on his relationship with his people through his prophet. The first thing we notice is the root problem of idolatry that serves to drive a wedge in between God and his people and diminish our relationship with God. Idolatry—the worship of other false gods, and not just golden ones—is the central issue behind almost all of God’s judgment oracles because idols distract us and will eventually destroy our ultimate loyalty to God. Whether it is golden calves, baals, money, power, sex, security, health or whatever, when our idols pull us away from God so that we are more busy thinking about and serving them than thinking about God and how to please him by living as the fully human beings he created us to be, it has a serious deteriorating effect on our behavior, which inevitably dehumanizes us. For example, recall that last week God condemned the political shenanigans of Israel’s rulers and the violence and murder that resulted. When we are firmly rooted in God’s truth and good will for us, these kinds of behaviors are simply not possible.
Not only that, when we pull away from God to follow our own disordered desires or idols (or both), we separate ourselves from the only real source of life, which will inevitably result in our death. After all, if God is our only source of life, why should we expect any other outcome? This is not about a vengeful and angry God taking it out on his people whenever we don’t get things right. This is about us living with the consequences of our behaviors when we choose consistently to separate ourselves from God through our disordered worship of false gods.
We see this dynamic illustrated powerfully in today’s gospel lesson. Jesus uses a request for him to settle a property dispute as the pretext to warn against the idolatry of greed for material possessions. If we are going to learn anything from this parable, it is critical for us to stay focused on the main thing and not get distracted by the side issues. We can do that best by seeing the two things Jesus is not saying and then looking at what he does say. Jesus is not condemning wealth nor is he condemning wise and judicious planning. Instead, Jesus is condemning the idolatry of greed for material possessions on the rich fool’s part which led him ignore his relationship with God and hoard his possessions, assume that life could be secured and its quality measured by those possessions, and regard his wealth and property as his own rather than as part of God’s many and generous blessings.
As people who live in a materialist culture and who are constantly bombarded with exactly these messages, we need to pay attention to these warnings lest we succumb to them (if we haven’t already). The rich man was a fool precisely because he put his ultimate hope and trust in something that simply cannot give life. No matter how rich we are, no matter how powerful we are, no matter how secure we are, none of it can give us life and when we die we must leave it all behind. We tend to reduce these things to mere cliches, which itself is a symptom of the greater problem of our idolatry. After all, who really takes cliches seriously?
Well, in this case, God apparently does because he calls the rich fool to account and reminds him (and us) that all the blessings we enjoy, from health to wealth and everything in between are not ours but God’s generous blessings showered on us, and when we focus on the blessings rather than on the Provider, we put ourselves in mortal danger because we are not doing the things that God calls us to do as his image bearers, things like being loving and generous and kind and humble so that God can use us to bring his healing love to the world.
And this helps us better understand God’s reaction to idolatry that we see in our OT lesson. We see both a mixture of anger, sadness, and disbelief, not unlike that of a jilted lover or incredulous parent. God reminds his people of all that he has done for them (and us), undeserving as they (and we) are. He called his people Israel into existence to bring his healing love to the nations, but they could only do that when they learned from God how truly human beings behave. That’s why God initially gave his people the Law through Moses. But God’s people were not interested in learning how God called them to live. They were more interested in securing his blessings for their own benefit and when they received God’s blessings, they ran off after other gods! We should always note that the problem of idolatry usually occurred during times of prosperity for God’s people, not during hard times. No, it took the harsh realities of living in God’s good but fallen world where sickness, evil, death, and all kinds of other nasty stuff regularly occur to make God’s people wake up and smell their foolishness in abandoning God. And lest we get all haughty and look down our noses at God’s people Israel, are we much different? Don’t we too get all proud and presumptuous when things go swimmingly well for us so that like the rich fool, we start deluding ourselves into thinking our prosperity is our own doing instead of the result of God’s generous blessings on us, undeserving as we are?
This is why believing in a sovereign God—a God who is not defeated even by the appearance of evil gone rampant in his world—is so critical for us to get our minds around because it is is part of the basis for the gospel of Jesus Christ and this what Paul and the OT writers want us to hear this morning. As both the psalmist and Hosea remind us, God’s heart is gracious and kind to his people and God has a track record of rescuing them from their exile. Whether it was from Egypt or Babylon, God consistently rescues his people from what oppresses them despite their sin and stubborn rebellion against him and he does this because of his steadfast love for them.
Believing in a sovereign and gracious God is also part of the basis for Paul’s astonishing claims in our epistle lesson because the sovereign God who reveals himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is precisely the God who has rescued us from our exile to sin and death and made us a new people in Jesus the Messiah. As we saw last week, God did this in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus and in our baptism we become like Jesus in his death and resurrection. In today’s lesson, Paul works out for us the implications of this wondrous gift to us. Our natural inclination is to zoom in on the behaviors Paul identifies in this passage, in this case behaviors that revolve around sexual ethics and our speech, and to reduce these behaviors to a list of dos and don’ts that every good Christian should follow. But we miss Paul’s main thrust if we do that. Yes, our behavior matters but what Paul really wants us to see is the reality of our union with Christ as a result of our baptism. Our very being is changed, precisely because we share in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection which enables us to act more and more like Jesus. But this isn’t automatic nor is it a one time event. Rather it is a daily process that we have to work out in Jesus’ power over a lifetime. And that’s the key. In Jesus’ power, not our own. To do this, Paul tells us we must set our minds on things above, i.e., on Jesus, who is currently hidden from our sight in God’s space (heaven), but whose Spirit lives in us because he is alive and Lord of the universe.
As we set our minds on Jesus and are united to him, it will necessarily mean that we will see the need to take off our old filthy clothes that got that way by us mucking around with our idols and fallen desires and put on new clothes that Jesus gives us so that we can join his party, the hope and promise of new life and new creation. What Paul is telling us is that we don’t have to wait until the Second Coming to enjoy new life in Jesus. We can enjoy it right now because we are being changed by his Spirit living in us.
But here is where we often hit a snag because even though all this is true, it may not feel like it and this may lead us to believe we really haven’t been changed and/or share in Jesus’ inheritance. After all, it’s hard to believe you have new life in Jesus if you are suffering from a debilitating illness or if you are addicted to porn or struggle constantly with the same sins that seem to bedevil you regularly. But despite outward appearances and circumstances, Paul insists our union with Jesus is real and tells us to embrace this promise through faith. Once we wrap our minds around the truth that we have died and our life is now hidden with Jesus who is in heaven, our heart (our core) will start to come around and we will be ready to experience the joy of holy living because we know we are empowered to do so by Jesus’ power, not our own.
As we are empowered by Jesus to become more and more like him, i.e., to have God’s image restored in us so that we become the fully human beings God created and wants us to be, Jesus, through the Spirit, renews our minds to act accordingly. We will look closely at our old fallen habits that bring about discord and rancor and hurt and seek to put them to death with the help of Jesus through the Spirit. In other words, Paul expects us to use our renewed minds to think deeply rather than superficially about issues like sexual ethics and how we treat each other in our speech. Guided by God’s love and truth contained in Scripture and living life together as healed and redeemed people of God, we are called to think carefully about what we think, say, and do about these topics et al. and how they play out in our fellowship here at St. Augustine’s and in the broader contexts of our lives. None of this is particularly easy, but our job as Christians is not to park our minds at the door but to think harder about what it means to embody Jesus’ love to the world, both in our actions and in what we support or oppose in the political and social arenas.
Let me give you a quick, albeit imperfect, example of how this all works. When I was a boy, I idolized my grandpa Shaffer, in part, because of his great, great love for me. I wanted to dress like him, talk like him, and act like him, and even took on the nickname, “Little Earl.” I didn’t think I had to do any of this to gain his favor because I knew he already loved me unconditionally. I did it because I loved him and wanted to be like him and to do that I had to think and act like him. Now to be sure, my grandpa wasn’t hidden from me in heaven nor did he promise me eternal life and the hope of new creation. But my point is that I did all this because I loved my grandpa for who he was and wanted to be like him, and I had to work out in my young mind what that looked like, based on who I knew him to be. This, I think, is what Paul is trying to get us to see in our passage today. Living life in Jesus is not about following an arbitrary set of rules we cannot possibly hope to follow in the first place. It is having a relationship with Jesus that will allow him to empower us to live and be like him, both here and in the promised new creation. If we can wrap our minds around this mind-boggling love and grace of God, we will want to change our old clothes and put on the same kinds of clothes Jesus wears. In other words we will want to become just like him in our thinking, speaking, and actions and be empowered to do so. We may never be called to do signs and wonders as our Lord did, but we are all called to embody the grace and love of God as manifested in Jesus.
So this week, if you are not already doing so, start using your mind to think about these things. Start by thinking about the deeper issues around idolatry that are involved in our lessons this morning. Ask Jesus to open your mind to their meaning. What are the texts calling you to put on and take off in your life so that you can become more like Jesus? Make this a daily habit and ask other Christians you trust to help you track your progress so that your faith will grow. Faith always seeks understanding and we rob ourselves of faith-building material if we ignore real examples of God working in our lives and the lives of others. If you do that consistently, sooner or later Jesus will lead you by his grace and power to really accept the gift he has given you in himself to empower you to live as he does and share in his inheritance. And when that happens, you will surely know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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